This is part of a series called “The Bottled Scream” A Disease of Self – Understanding Addiction and Recovery. To go back to the introduction click here.

Addiction

Rock Bottom

My alcoholism almost killed me. I had spent the last nine months in alcoholic psychosis, the so-called DTs (delirium tremems) hallucinating, drinking and vomiting, repeat.

I could hardly get the drink to my mouth with my violently shaking hands.

Tin and glass, cracking against my teeth.

I was so jaundiced my neck had turned a dark sickly shade of copper green!

My eyesight deteriorated to such an extent, that it was about like straining to see through scratched plastic glass.

Eyesight is linked to liver and my fatty liver had reduced by eyesight by half.  

I was so weak from drinking, not eating, a 8 and half stone weakling, who had to stop on the stairs, every three steps, to rest and start again.

Sleep had been replaced by twenty minute snoozes, awoken by terror and the dripping sweats.

How the hell had it come to this?

I had planned none of it. 

I thought of death and of suicide. There was a place worse than dying and I had somehow ended up there.

All plans on killing myself foundered on my angrily held assertion to myself that I hadn’t asked for any of this. None of this was my fault!

That indignation was as close as I could get to hope, which had recently left home. 

I drank because of my bloody tough upbringing, didn’t I, and that wasn’t my fault either?

Many had had similar upbringing and they weren’t slipping down the plughole along with my stomach-heated up wine?

Why me?

Why the hell was I in this hellish hole of despair and utter defeat?

Worse still the drink had stopped working, only staving off the full horror of the hallucination and preventing me from having the alcoholic fit that would kill me.

My wife would travel to the shops, reluctantly buy grates full of cheap Spanish wine and almost undrinkabe German lager that tasted like liquid Gorgonzola, unwittingly keep me alive.

We were both ignorant of the reality that any prolonged period without drink could have killed me.

That a diversion from the straight road home, after shopping , or a car accident,  or some other unavoidable occurrence that slowed the delivery of my alcohol, could have killed me via an alcoholic seizure.

My wife hated spending all that money on drink that rarely stayed long in my stomach.

People would shout over to her as she waited at the till “Having another party!?”

Little did they ever know how far they were from the truth.

“Voices” – Image by James henry Johnston – https://www.artfinder.com/product/voices-f5dd/